Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

T'tzavveh 5756
Exodus 27:20 - 30:10
March 2, 1996 11 Adar 5756

Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

My father died 14 years ago. This week I
will observe his Yahrzeit once again. The
date of a Yahrzeit is determined by the day
of death (not burial) according to the Hebrew
calendar, a fact which means that the day
varies from year to year in the English
calendar. My father's death occurred on the
8th of Adar, just one day after the day
assigned by tradition to the death of Moses.
Like Moses, my father was "a servant of
God," and I find comfort and meaning in the
proximity of their Yahrzeits.

A Yahrzeit triggers a flood of poignant
personal memories. But embedded as it is in
the grid of the Hebrew calendar, it also
evokes associations that transcend the
individual. In the case of my father, his
Yahrzeit usually comes just prior to the
Shabbat before Purim, which bears the
special name of Shabbat Zakhor - the
Sabbath of Remembrance. So the subject of
memory in Judaism is very much in the air,
enriching the thoughts that well up in me
about my own roots.

Shabbat Zakhor draws its name from the first
word of the passage in Deuteronomy (25:17-19)
which we read after the completion of
the regular parasha: "Remember what
Amalek did to you on your journey, after you
left Egypt (17)." We prepare ourselves for
Purim by reading of Haman's Amalekite
ancestry, first in the wilderness of Sinai and
then in the days of King Saul (the haftara).

I was born in Nazi Germany at a time when
Haman's 20th-century descendants moved
to expel its terrified Jewish subjects whom
they had just stripped of their citizenship.
The original indictment of Mordecai's people
by Haman was still being hurled against the
Jewish community in which my father served
as rabbi: "There is a certain people, scattered
and dispersed among the other peoples in all
the provinces of your realm [King
Ahasuerus], whose laws are different from
those of any other people and who do not
obey the king's laws; and it is not in Your
Majesty's interest to tolerate them (Esther
3:8)."

Put differently: though foreign and
subversive, the Jews had managed to
penetrate all sectors of national life without
bringing any economic benefit to the country.
One is startled by the ageless paradigmatic
power of Haman's charges. How short-lived
the enlightened experiment to base Jewish
life on inalienable human rights rather than
on utilitarian sufferance!

The command to remember the assault of
Amalek on Israel is recorded twice in the
Torah. The passage in Exodus (17:8-16) we
read a few weeks ago. But interestingly, it is
not the one selected for reading on Shabbat
Zakhor. I suspect the reason is that
Deuteronomy stresses the depravity of the
attack, while Exodus dwells primarily on the
miracle of the victory. When Moses, with
the help of his brothers, held his arms aloft,
the tide of battle turned in Israel's favor. In
contrast, Deuteronomy informs us that the
Amalekites were terrorists rather than
soldiers: "...undeterred by fear of God, he
[Amalek] surprised you on the march, when
you were famished and weary, and cut down
all the stragglers in your rear (25:18)."

The incident gave rise to one of the harshest
injunctions of the entire Torah: to wipe out in
due time the name of Amalek from the face
of the earth. King Saul failed to comply fully
when he had a decisive military edge over
the Amalekites and the lapse in his obedience
to God's demand cost him his throne.
Deuteronomy alone makes clear the gravity
of Amalek's crime. Without fear of God,
Amalek had spurned the most basic tenets of
human decency. To savage the least
threatening and most innocent members of
society placed Amalek beyond the pale of
humanity. If Israel stands for the ultimate
dominion of human virtue, Amalek
symbolizes the darkness of the human heart.
The contest never ends because our hearts
remain divided.

Memory is the lifeblood of Jewish being. No
word in the Hebrew language rings with
greater resonance than "zakhor." A flood of
associations come to mind. We are bidden in
the Ten Commandments to "remember
(zakhor) the sabbath day and keep it holy
(Exodus 20:8)." Moses adjures Israel in his
great poetic peroration to place memory at
the center of their consciousness:
"Remember (zakhor) the days, consider the
years of ages past; ask your father, he will
inform you, your elders, they will tell you
(Deuteronomy 32:7)."

In truth, Judaism is one long and daring
effort to shift the ground of religion from
nature to history, from changes in the
seasons of the year to turning points in the
destiny of the nation.

Rosh Hashana, the least historical of
Judaism's holy days, is still called
Yom ha-Zikaron (the day of remembrance) to
underscore the role of memory in the process
of introspection. And the word surfaces
again slightly altered in the name of the
memorial service for the dead, Yizkor (may
God remember), at which time we are awash
with particles from the past. With the title
Zakhor of Professor Yosef Yerushalmi's
popular 1982 meditation on "Jewish history
and Jewish memory," the word has even
entered the English language.

As this web of associations suggests,
Judaism has not been absorbed exclusively
with its calamities. Its preferred mode of
organizing the past in the Middle Ages was
in terms of the inner life, the names and
books of leaders who were responsible for
rejuvenating and transmitting the tradition.
Only in the wake of the massive expulsions
of Sefardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula
in the last decade of the 15th century did
Jewish chroniclers increasingly focus on the
history of persecutions and martyrdom.

Yet the basic impulse of Jewish memory was
to preserve the instances of creativity as well
as of catastrophe. A single fast day would
do to commemorate a long list of calamities,
even if they did not all occur exactly on that
day. On the principle that a day destined for
mourning one tragedy could be expanded to
include the memory of other tragedies, the
Rabbis struggled to keep the calendar from
being overshadowed by days of darkness
and grief. Though that policy may have done
some violence to the individuality of historical
events, it surely did protect the balance
necessary for psychic well-being. Would
that we could reclaim that ancient wisdom
for our own post-Holocaust era.